There is good news: the “White Paper” to “debate and finalize national education policy”, distributed in December 2006 by the Ministry of Education, though
incomplete and flawed, is an enormous step forward. So is the new school curriculum – which somewhat mysteriously and improperly preceded the White Paper. These may persuade even hardened cynics that the country’s school education system still has a future. One is pleasantly surprised that this comes from a government ministry that has been in shambles for decades and is now headed, rather inauspiciously, by a former ISI general.
Of course, there are problems aplenty. The White Paper, among other things, is manifestly unfair to Pakistan’s minorities because it pretends that they do not exist; it contradicts itself in places; its multiple authors appear not to have communicated well with each other; and the treatment of the problems of higher education – as well as madrassa education – is unsatisfactory. But it is an accomplishment in spite of these failings.
First, a government document that aims to have a debate about policy in consultation with ordinary citizens is a welcome concept. Pakistanis have occasionally had political leaders who were elected, but never a bureaucracy soliciting people’s views on crucial public matters. The invitation given to intellectuals and civil society organizations is novel, as is the apparent willingness to incorporate suggestions which these debates may generate. A revised White Paper in March 2007 will hopefully contain important changes.
Second, the White Paper draws upon new statistical data recently collected in a National Education Census on enrolments, dropout rates, geographical distributions, private schools, etc. This provides a framework for conducting an informed and reasoned debate, rather than vacuous theorizing.
Third, the White Paper Team, headed by a respected retired civil servant, Javed Hasan Aly, starts from the premise that Pakistan seeks progress and prosperity: “Recognizing education as a right of the citizen, it is the aim of the state of Pakistan to provide equal and ample opportunity to all its citizens to realize their full potential as individuals….preparing them for life, livelihood, and nation-building”.
This is in stark contrast with earlier education policies – which saw Pakistani education as a tool to forcibly remake children’s minds. An official document, issued eleven years ago by the same ministry, had required that school children be taught to “make speeches on jihad and shahadat”; be aware of “India’s evil designs against Pakistan”; that they must “demonstrate by actions a belief in the fear of Allah”; go on field trips to “visit police stations”; and must “collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and National Guards”. [These are direct quotes.]
This grim – if not terrifying – set of goals, has now been replaced with a relatively moderate vision of a Muslim Pakistan in which, “We have to unburden ourselves of the weight of centuries of nostalgia, suffocating our capacities to find our way out from the darkness of ignorance”.
Fine words, but surely real change will need more than vague hopes typed on white sheets of papers. The federal ministry of education and the four provincial education ministries are in a disastrous state. Their inefficiency, disorganization, and corrupt practices are legendary. Are there actually 12,737 non-functional “ghost” schools (as officially stated) or more like 30,000 in fact? Does the latest count of madrassas actually stand at 12,979 or is it closer to 22,000?
The management of educational institutions could not be poorer. The collapse of public schools comes from the inability of the state to deliver even half-decent education, or even to effectively monitor what is happening around it. This is what caused an explosion of private schools which, starting from near zero, now cover about 33% of Pakistan and as much as 70% of its cities.
This is bad news. Mere moralizing or proposing reforms and new curricula to the nation – but not knowing how to implement them – will make us despondent once again. Without reviving the public school system, education will become even more inaccessible to the poor and make it impossible to ever create a just society. Unfortunately, on this matter, the White Paper has no action plan that actually shows the way forward. We really should be told who will do the job. But even more importantly, what exactly needs to be done?
It is therefore time to construct workable plans and address real needs, albeit in ways never considered earlier. As one example, consider the issue of monitoring the country’s schools, without which successful management of a large system is simply impossible.
Imagine a situation where a real (not fictitious) data profile exists on every one of the 245,682 Pakistani schools. These would be public and private, rich and poor, located in the cities or in remote mountainous or desert areas. The more details one has the better, but anything is better than nothing. Individual school profiles could be used to rationally apportion the correct quantum of government and private resources, check wastages, improve school administration and teaching quality, etc.
Such a huge project is impossible by traditional means. But space-age technology is changing the world, and Pakistan can use it to clean up its educational mess. Effective school monitoring, a vital but unfulfilled task, has suddenly become possible.
How? One satellite in geosynchronous orbit over Pakistan can locate every single school and also determine certain crude parameters. Information sent down by its cameras can easily reveal when a certain school opened and closed on a particular day, roughly how many students entered and left, etc. School buildings used as warehouses or cattle sheds could be instantly identified; there would be fewer ghost schools. All information would be stored in that school’s dossier located in a computer system, accessible to the federal and provincial education ministries.
In most cases, school inspectors on the ground could supplement the satellite pictures. There is, of course, nothing new about school inspections. But what if an inspector is required to take pictures of the school he or she periodically visits, as well as to fill in required student and teacher attendance numbers, various assessment forms, the textbook and supplies situation, and then upload the information directly to the satellite above?
GPS technology allows the satellite to know exactly where the inspector is located. It is easy to make a report uploadable only from the school actually being inspected. Fictitious reports, which are the bane of the present system of school inspections, would become much harder. A report would instantly become part of that school’s dossier, accessible in a centralized location. Even for urban schools in posh areas, this form of direct inspection would provide a source of valuable information.
With this kind of technological assistance, the five education ministries could turn into effective watchdogs servicing the needs of schools. The legions of their listless employees, presently occupying vast amounts of building space but doing nothing, could be turned into professionals sitting in front of computers. They would have various data at their fingertips, and be constantly communicating electronically with colleagues, supervisors, and suppliers of books and materials. Surely, the time for new ideas has come.
For the reader who thinks this is utopian: please get yourself a computer, internet connection, and download “Google Earth” for free. A satellite in the sky above you will allow you to see your house, the car standing in front of it, and the general environs. One can, of course, have far clearer pictures by paying appropriate fees.
To be sure, technology must never be considered a panacea. Structural changes in the system of Pakistan’s educational management are essential. Massive teacher training and examination reform are obviously crucial, as is the need to decentralize school administration and turn it over to the town and zila level. These problems are also amenable to technological improvements, albeit to different degrees.
Clarity of purpose, political will, adequate financial resources for education, and willingness to appreciate and use modern technology – arranged in this order – can transform Pakistan’s school system. Should we dare to hope?
Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Teaching Science Badly – and Well
A normal, intelligent and curious child – particularly if he or she is Pakistani – must think science to be the most wretched of subjects at school. A few lucky exceptions aside, this is the fate of most. Very
few children will actually encounter science in a manner that they enjoy and deserve.
This is sad. Science is taught in schools for a good enough reason – we owe the modern world to it. The prosperity or poverty of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control science. Take its products away, and we would be back in the dark days of our ancestors when a child at birth was more likely to die than live.
But there is another excellent reason to study science. Far from being a cold and soulless collection of facts, it is delicately beautiful with principles that are amazingly simple and precise. Yet, they are also incredibly powerful and universal. Exactly the same laws explain why stars shine, the blue of the sky, the beating of the human heart, and the flight of birds. Science grips the imagination and fascinates endlessly. It has certainly engaged me for most of my life and I, like most scientists, will never tire of it.
If it is so wonderful, why then do only a few students in Pakistan want to become scientists? The problem is the prevalence of false notions of science. This, in turn, leads to teaching that ranges from bad to terrible, and thus to students who despise what they must study and memorize.
In contrast, a recent survey in India revealed that a majority of school students see science as the most glamorous and interesting career to pursue. Many go on to becoming the world’s top scientists. This is a key factor in the emergence of India as a major world power, in scientific as well as economic terms.
A science-phobic younger generation in Pakistan is bad news. This must change else we shall be stuck with low technological prowess, small potentials for future economic growth, and perpetual dependency. These are inescapable penalties for any country without a large scientifically trained workforce. It would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the term “knowledge economy” as a mere clich.
But what is it exactly that we do so wrong? And, what needs to be put right? To answer these questions needs a clear understanding of what science is. We must also know how it functions, and what it values. Pedagogical style and techniques will follow naturally once we properly clarify and define.
My definition: science is a body of knowledge, together with a very definite way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. Note the phrase “a very definite way”. This indicates that science must be distinguished from art, humanities, religion, etc. Their definitions of acceptable knowledge, and the paths leading to it, are totally different.
Science has no place for subjective experiences and, instead, to distinguish between true and false it relies exclusively on logic, reason, and experiment. Hypothesis, theory, fact, observation, and experiment are at the roots of what is known as the “scientific method”.
All this sounds a bit abstract, so back to plain talk: science demands proof using things that we can measure. There cannot be airy-fairy discussions of things. Science refuses to offer an opinion on things that are unobservable, or whose existence is impossible to verify even in principle. What you cannot see may still actually be there, but science is going to be mum about it. It’s as simple as that.
Every discipline has values and norms. Science certainly does too. Its central tenet is that one’s evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and that one’s experiments will be subjected to replication. Therefore a high premium is put upon skepticism and there is a deep distaste for dogmatism. Successful scientists, mathematics, and engineers are valued because of the institutionalized skepticism they imbibed during their education.
With all this philosophy now behind us, we can now ask what constitutes good pedagogic content for science, the teaching style, and the mistakes that are commonly made. Most importantly we need to ask: what are good science teachers actually supposed to do in class?
I. First, they should help students to simultaneously acquire scientific knowledge of the world, as well as cultivate scientific habits of mind. These are two completely different things. One is providing data and information about the physical world, the other is creating a mindset needed to properly interpret this data.
Therefore, science education must begin with simple things such as exploring the chemical properties of common substances, plants and animals, and systematic observations of the social behavior of humans and other animals. This requires that teachers show students to dissect, sort, count, collect, catalogue, compute, graph, and make sensible notes. Use of simple equipment like rulers, lenses, thermometers, cameras, etc. is important. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear is often from the lack of opportunity, but girls also suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools.
II. Second, good teachers must emphasize learning rather than teaching. The two are different. Learning is a process that progresses from the concrete to the abstract as cognitive abilities slowly improve. But students first need to get acquainted with the things around them such as devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers. They must observe them, collect them, handle them, describe them, become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, argue about them, and then to try to find answers to their questions. Abstractions develop after these experiences, not before.
Good teaching starts with using tangible things. One does not need a Ph.D in cognitive studies to know that young people learn best when they deal with visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic objects. As their experience grows, they learn to understand abstract concepts, manipulate symbols, reason logically, solve theorems, and generalize. These abilities are destroyed, or left woefully undeveloped, by rote memorization.
Parsimony is essential. A good teacher picks the most important concepts and skills and concentrates on the quality of understanding, not on the quantity of information presented. In some expensive private O- and A- level Pakistani schools lots of scientific drilling exercises are given for exam grade improvement. Even when successful, this does not necessarily create mindsets for doing good scientific work at a later stage.
Similarly, overemphasizing vocabulary can be dangerous. Understanding is the main purpose of science teaching but many teachers think that their job is to make students learn big words. This detracts from science as a process and jeopardizes learning, particularly in a linguistically fractured country like ours.
III. Third, good science pedagogy happens when the spirit of healthy questioning is deliberately cultivated in the classroom. The scientific mindset starts developing naturally when students encounter questions that engage their mind rather than memory.
It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.
Dogmatism kills science. Students should therefore experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. Never should the teacher say X or Y is true just because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a student in my university class gives me this argument! But this is what these over-grown children have inevitably become.)
Equally importantly, teachers should never portray themselves as absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. Of course, there has to be a delicate balance here. As a teacher, I do know more than my students and I should not hide that. Was this untrue, my salary should rightfully be stopped. But the point is that I am occasionally wrong, and do make a mistake in class now and then. This can be turned to excellent advantage, as I have often discovered.
How? In traditional societies like ours, the student is told that his teacher “tumharay baap ki tarah hai”, an autocratic and tyrannical figure whose word is the law. This attitude is simply incompatible with the relative student-teacher equality that science teaching requires. Therefore I use the occasion provided by my mistake – if it genuinely is one – to prove that my authority is not absolute. It gives confidence to the student who points out my mistake and strengthens the spirit of scientific inquiry in my class.
It is wrong to say that science requires no faith. It does, albeit of a certain kind. Personally, I have never seen the 60 moons of Jupiter but am willing to accept their existence on faith because I know that, at least in principle, someone else can do it. In general, science teachers must help students achieve a delicate kind of balance between this kind of faith and skepticism. Teachers must also be able to explain coherently what caused the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists. It is extremely important to keep an open mind and challenge when necessary.
Such open-mindedness is good not just for science pedagogy, but also for changing the stultifying cultural conditions of our society. The inability to deal with, or comprehend, scientific and technological matters has steadily lead to its dangerous “loser” mentality and a lurch towards extra-scientific, magical, and hodge-podge solutions.
Examples abound. Through programs produced and popularized by scientific illiterates, a virulently anti-scientific Pakistani television culture has emerged. It bashes science without knowing what it is about. Flipping through the channels, you can see TV programs trashing evolution, discussing strange fiery creatures in the sky, ascribing earthquakes and calamities to divine retribution, and containing laughable mish-mashes of science and religion.
Bad science teaching in our schools and wide-spread scientific illiteracy has made the siren song of unreason ever more sonorous and attractive. In older times the idiocy of the “aamils”, pirs, and mullahs and assorted soothsayers was accepted by just the ignorant and illiterate. But today college graduates, as well as the rich and powerful, now calmly accept this as high wisdom.
Good science education alone can change this. The demons of superstition can only be chased away by those who have learned science the correct way. But for that we may first need a major cultural and attitudinal change that permits real science to be taught in our schools.
few children will actually encounter science in a manner that they enjoy and deserve.
This is sad. Science is taught in schools for a good enough reason – we owe the modern world to it. The prosperity or poverty of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control science. Take its products away, and we would be back in the dark days of our ancestors when a child at birth was more likely to die than live.
But there is another excellent reason to study science. Far from being a cold and soulless collection of facts, it is delicately beautiful with principles that are amazingly simple and precise. Yet, they are also incredibly powerful and universal. Exactly the same laws explain why stars shine, the blue of the sky, the beating of the human heart, and the flight of birds. Science grips the imagination and fascinates endlessly. It has certainly engaged me for most of my life and I, like most scientists, will never tire of it.
If it is so wonderful, why then do only a few students in Pakistan want to become scientists? The problem is the prevalence of false notions of science. This, in turn, leads to teaching that ranges from bad to terrible, and thus to students who despise what they must study and memorize.
In contrast, a recent survey in India revealed that a majority of school students see science as the most glamorous and interesting career to pursue. Many go on to becoming the world’s top scientists. This is a key factor in the emergence of India as a major world power, in scientific as well as economic terms.
A science-phobic younger generation in Pakistan is bad news. This must change else we shall be stuck with low technological prowess, small potentials for future economic growth, and perpetual dependency. These are inescapable penalties for any country without a large scientifically trained workforce. It would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the term “knowledge economy” as a mere clich.
But what is it exactly that we do so wrong? And, what needs to be put right? To answer these questions needs a clear understanding of what science is. We must also know how it functions, and what it values. Pedagogical style and techniques will follow naturally once we properly clarify and define.
My definition: science is a body of knowledge, together with a very definite way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. Note the phrase “a very definite way”. This indicates that science must be distinguished from art, humanities, religion, etc. Their definitions of acceptable knowledge, and the paths leading to it, are totally different.
Science has no place for subjective experiences and, instead, to distinguish between true and false it relies exclusively on logic, reason, and experiment. Hypothesis, theory, fact, observation, and experiment are at the roots of what is known as the “scientific method”.
All this sounds a bit abstract, so back to plain talk: science demands proof using things that we can measure. There cannot be airy-fairy discussions of things. Science refuses to offer an opinion on things that are unobservable, or whose existence is impossible to verify even in principle. What you cannot see may still actually be there, but science is going to be mum about it. It’s as simple as that.
Every discipline has values and norms. Science certainly does too. Its central tenet is that one’s evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and that one’s experiments will be subjected to replication. Therefore a high premium is put upon skepticism and there is a deep distaste for dogmatism. Successful scientists, mathematics, and engineers are valued because of the institutionalized skepticism they imbibed during their education.
With all this philosophy now behind us, we can now ask what constitutes good pedagogic content for science, the teaching style, and the mistakes that are commonly made. Most importantly we need to ask: what are good science teachers actually supposed to do in class?
I. First, they should help students to simultaneously acquire scientific knowledge of the world, as well as cultivate scientific habits of mind. These are two completely different things. One is providing data and information about the physical world, the other is creating a mindset needed to properly interpret this data.
Therefore, science education must begin with simple things such as exploring the chemical properties of common substances, plants and animals, and systematic observations of the social behavior of humans and other animals. This requires that teachers show students to dissect, sort, count, collect, catalogue, compute, graph, and make sensible notes. Use of simple equipment like rulers, lenses, thermometers, cameras, etc. is important. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear is often from the lack of opportunity, but girls also suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools.
II. Second, good teachers must emphasize learning rather than teaching. The two are different. Learning is a process that progresses from the concrete to the abstract as cognitive abilities slowly improve. But students first need to get acquainted with the things around them such as devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers. They must observe them, collect them, handle them, describe them, become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, argue about them, and then to try to find answers to their questions. Abstractions develop after these experiences, not before.
Good teaching starts with using tangible things. One does not need a Ph.D in cognitive studies to know that young people learn best when they deal with visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic objects. As their experience grows, they learn to understand abstract concepts, manipulate symbols, reason logically, solve theorems, and generalize. These abilities are destroyed, or left woefully undeveloped, by rote memorization.
Parsimony is essential. A good teacher picks the most important concepts and skills and concentrates on the quality of understanding, not on the quantity of information presented. In some expensive private O- and A- level Pakistani schools lots of scientific drilling exercises are given for exam grade improvement. Even when successful, this does not necessarily create mindsets for doing good scientific work at a later stage.
Similarly, overemphasizing vocabulary can be dangerous. Understanding is the main purpose of science teaching but many teachers think that their job is to make students learn big words. This detracts from science as a process and jeopardizes learning, particularly in a linguistically fractured country like ours.
III. Third, good science pedagogy happens when the spirit of healthy questioning is deliberately cultivated in the classroom. The scientific mindset starts developing naturally when students encounter questions that engage their mind rather than memory.
It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.
Dogmatism kills science. Students should therefore experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. Never should the teacher say X or Y is true just because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a student in my university class gives me this argument! But this is what these over-grown children have inevitably become.)
Equally importantly, teachers should never portray themselves as absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. Of course, there has to be a delicate balance here. As a teacher, I do know more than my students and I should not hide that. Was this untrue, my salary should rightfully be stopped. But the point is that I am occasionally wrong, and do make a mistake in class now and then. This can be turned to excellent advantage, as I have often discovered.
How? In traditional societies like ours, the student is told that his teacher “tumharay baap ki tarah hai”, an autocratic and tyrannical figure whose word is the law. This attitude is simply incompatible with the relative student-teacher equality that science teaching requires. Therefore I use the occasion provided by my mistake – if it genuinely is one – to prove that my authority is not absolute. It gives confidence to the student who points out my mistake and strengthens the spirit of scientific inquiry in my class.
It is wrong to say that science requires no faith. It does, albeit of a certain kind. Personally, I have never seen the 60 moons of Jupiter but am willing to accept their existence on faith because I know that, at least in principle, someone else can do it. In general, science teachers must help students achieve a delicate kind of balance between this kind of faith and skepticism. Teachers must also be able to explain coherently what caused the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists. It is extremely important to keep an open mind and challenge when necessary.
Such open-mindedness is good not just for science pedagogy, but also for changing the stultifying cultural conditions of our society. The inability to deal with, or comprehend, scientific and technological matters has steadily lead to its dangerous “loser” mentality and a lurch towards extra-scientific, magical, and hodge-podge solutions.
Examples abound. Through programs produced and popularized by scientific illiterates, a virulently anti-scientific Pakistani television culture has emerged. It bashes science without knowing what it is about. Flipping through the channels, you can see TV programs trashing evolution, discussing strange fiery creatures in the sky, ascribing earthquakes and calamities to divine retribution, and containing laughable mish-mashes of science and religion.
Bad science teaching in our schools and wide-spread scientific illiteracy has made the siren song of unreason ever more sonorous and attractive. In older times the idiocy of the “aamils”, pirs, and mullahs and assorted soothsayers was accepted by just the ignorant and illiterate. But today college graduates, as well as the rich and powerful, now calmly accept this as high wisdom.
Good science education alone can change this. The demons of superstition can only be chased away by those who have learned science the correct way. But for that we may first need a major cultural and attitudinal change that permits real science to be taught in our schools.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)